A New Venture

I’m about to embark on a new library-related adventure with my always-fashionable librarian friend, April Aultman Becker. After one too many exchanges on Gmail and Google Chat, we realized that a decent chunk of our time at work involved making information look good. Despite never receiving any formal media or design training in library school, we were often trial-and-error-ing it through Photoshop, MS Publisher, and if we were really brave, Illustrator (gasp!) in order to churn out eye-catching, aesthetically pleasing flyers, handouts, web designs, or brochures advertising different aspects of our libraries.

We are, of course, not alone in this activity. Librarians everywhere are creating displays to highlight collections, designing bookmarks and other giveaways for campus fairs or orientation sessions, and developing handouts to distribute during workshops and classes. We often rely on other librarians for their critiques and input and find inspiration from the design work they do in their own libraries. Yet there really isn’t an online space for librarians to post and share their creative work.

So we’ve created a new site, Librarian Design Share, which we hope will be a source of ideas and inspiration for library creative-types everywhere.

It’s a site where librarians, library staff, and library students can showcase their creative work and make it available for others in libraries to reuse, adapt, or transform. Right now it’s populated by our own work (including an amazing infographic created by April), but we are on the hunt for submissions! We’re looking for: